Entertainment

'Silicon Valley' actor T.J. Miller accused of sexual assault

Updated, 4:04 p.m.: The Hollywood Reporter announced that Comedy Central has canceled Miller's upcoming The Gorburger Show, but not due to the allegations detailed below.

Original post:

A woman has accused comedian T.J. Miller of physically and sexually assaulting her in college. Though the matter was addressed in part by a student court, she revealed her full story anonymously to The Daily Beast in a story published Tuesday morning in light of Hollywood's ongoing revelations about systemic sexual assault and harassment. She detailed two separate incidents of alleged sexual or physical assault that she described as "so disorienting and so physically traumatic.”

The Daily Beast spoke with multiple people who knew the woman or Miller then and could help corroborate the allegations, which Miller and his wife have denied. Some women in the comedy community even told The Daily Beast that they refuse to work with Miller after previously hearing about this alleged incident, which they say Miller would occasionally joke about.

Miller met the woman who The Daily Beast dubs "Sarah" while in college at George Washington University. They started dating, but she recalls a few months into their relationship that he began shaking her and punched her during sex. They had both been drinking, so the next morning she wasn't sure what had happened except it left her with a bloody lip.

“He actually put me through something I have to live with, that I never would’ve chosen, that completely, completely set the tone for my sexual adult life.”

Another incident occurred after a party, which Sarah said she remembers "crystal clear," having drank less.

“We started to fool around, and very early in that, he put his hands around my throat and closed them, and I couldn’t breathe,” she said. “I was genuinely terrified and completely surprised...as someone who had only begun having sexual encounters, like, about three months earlier, I had no awareness this was a kink, and I had certainly not entered into any agreement that I would be choked."

Sarah says her roommates overheard her choking and gagging and came to help. She went to speak to them and went back to Miller, who she alleges penetrated her anally and with a beer bottle without her consent.

"Looking back, I wish we had done more to intervene, but we didn’t know what was going on," one of Sarah's former roommates told The Daily Beast. "This is a girl I didn’t know very well, but it didn’t mean I didn’t have the power to go into that room, and remove her from that situation, and protect her. We did what we thought was the right thing at the time. It wasn’t enough.”

Afterward, Sarah would try to make sense of the incidents by speaking to Miller's friends, whose chilling response checks out completely with what are unfortunately norms among many people both in Hollywood and beyond.

“Yeah, that’s just T.J.," they'd tell her.

Sarah went to the student court a year later, and was given little information after testifying but was told that the matter had been resolved. It's unclear exactly what consequence Miller faced and the university could not share details with The Daily Beast.

The Millers both knew Sarah and described her as "fixated" on their relationship and an unreliable character. Their full statement is below:

We met this woman over a decade ago while studying together in college, she attempted to break us up back then by plotting for over a year before making contradictory claims and accusations. She attempted to discredit both of our voices and use us against one another by trying to portray Kate to be a continuous abuse victim of T.J. (further efforts to hurt the two of us). She was asked to leave our university comedy group because of worrisome and disturbing behavior, which angered her immensely, she then became fixated on our relationship, and began telling people around campus “I’m going to destroy them” & “I’m going to ruin him.”We are confident that a full consideration of accounts from and since that time will shed light and clarity on the true nature of not only this person’s character, and also on the real facts of the matter. We stand together in stating this is nothing more than an unfortunate resurgence of her lies designed to wreak havoc on two happily married people in the public eye.She began again to circulate rumors online once our relationship became public.Sadly she is now using the current climate to bandwagon and launch these false accusations again. It is unfortunate that she is choosing this route as it undermines the important movement to make women feel safe coming forward about legitimate claims against real known predators.We stand together and will not allow this person to take advantage of a serious movement toward gender equality by allowing her to use this moment to muddy the water with an unrelated personal agenda. We feel we all have an obligation now more than ever to prevent people from using reporters to spin lies into headlines, and focus instead on what is real.We both champion and continue to stand up for people everywhere who have truly suffered injustice seeking to have justice brought into their lives.

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